My name is Dr. Johannes N. Blumenberg. I am working at GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences and I am the author of the Manual Coding Interface, which is a web interface to facilitate the coding of open-ended (survey) questions.
Even though automated coding of open-ended questions (e.g. of survey questions) became more important within the recent years, manual coding stays a widely used technique to prepare data to be analyzed quantitatively.
As I was working in my first project at the University of Mannheim in 2011, I faced the problem, that my students were asked to code a high number of open-ended questions, esteeming from several surveys. Of course, we wanted to make the process as easy as possible to them to improve the inter- and intra-coder reliability. Additionally, we needed a system which allowed us not only assign one single code to each item but to assess different dimensions simultaneously. And we wanted to have timestamps. Thus, Excel or any other statistics tool with a coding mask were not suited for our purpose. This was the birthday of the Manual Coding Interface.
As I only used it for my purpose, the code was not written with other users in mind. As the time went by several of my colleagues approached me and asked to provide them with this tool. After handing it out several times now, I decided to make it available publicity so that everyone may use it.
The usage and modification of the tool are free of charge. However, if you used it, please cite me:
Blumenberg, Johannes N. (2018). Manual Coding Interface – A web interface to facilitate the coding of open-ended (survey) questions. Available at www.Manual-Coding.com